Author Archives: skipper

Inflation 2022

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It is no surprise that lower income families, retirees on fixed income and debt-laden families are suffering under inflation much more harshly than those with higher income. An individual bringing home minimum wage will have to pay proportionately more for necessary commodities and food than a higher income individual.

For example, a person may bring home, after deductions, about $250/week. Because of a shortage in low income housing, as much as 50 percent of the individual’s income will be for rent. The remaining $125/week must purchase all other consumables, children’s expenses and fossil fuel needs.

If inflation rises by 7 percent as it has in just 4 months, the individual doesn’t have $125/week; they have $116/week. Mariner’s grocery shopping jumped by 15 percent. If the individual had shopped at mariner’s supermarket, their net value would be reduced by more than 7 percent.

Of course inflation affects everyone. Inflation inflicts tragedy on the poor but even ‘middle class’ families need to adjust spending patterns to minimize the higher cost of family living. What follows are suggested modifications for offsetting the loss of spending power:

  • Have two dinners each week that are meatless. Fruit salads, meatless vegetable pasta, bean soup are much less expensive without meat and, in fact, better for you.
  • Move away from pre-packaged, ready-to-eat foods. Does the reader remember how to use flour, rice and eggs?
  • How many channels on the smart TV are paid for? Cut back by half. Spend more time with your family – that’s free.
  • Many families have a weekend night out. How about switching to a night out every other week or not at all?
  • Adjust the furnace thermostat down by three degrees and wear a sweater – raise it for air conditioning.
  • Analyze auto trips per week. Find a way to stretch those trips to 10 days. A good game for this category would be to shop less frequently but limit the amount to what the old schedule would have purchased in a shorter time.
  • Alcohol consumption along with snacks is relatively expensive. Cut back by half or more; perhaps this is a good time to start a serious diet.

These ideas are offered to help the reader develop a mindset that lessens the impact of inflation. Mariner is positive that there are many more ideas the reader can conger.

Ancient Mariner

It is time for change . . .

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. . . Let’s hope the change will be productive. Mariner, especially with the input of Amos, knows he complains a lot. In this post, however, mariner simply is sharing evidence about why the nation is in dangerous disarray. Mariner will share with the reader his personal experiences which show the extent of fragmentation this nation suffers.

First, accept the fact that mariner is an old geezer with many of the typical maladies that come with old age. One malady among others is a lung issue. When mariner was young he suffered lung damage while working in an industrial factory. The resulting years since have been normal with no effects but in recent years the lungs are suffering a gradual decline.

Each year when mariner gets his general physical, three different pulmonologists have offered him a prescription that ‘may’ slow the decline. It is important to know that this prescription costs $10,000 each month. The firm that sells this prescription has arranged for some off-shoot firm to pay $8,000 in his behalf.

To each pulmonologist mariner said, “I will die before I accept that prescription.” This is the point of truth about the condition of our society: The CEO of the pharmaceutical firm that sells this drug each year makes $2.4 million in base salary. If mariner pays him 10 thousand/month, he will let mariner live longer.

This is the result of forty years of unbridled capitalism in the United States. This is the underlying cause of Trumpism and direct attacks on the principles of the Constitution. Working classes statistically make less today than they did forty years ago (Minimum wage in 1980 was $5/hour; that equates today to $19.50/hour). Mariner can throw many charts and comparisons at the reader that show a rapidly growing poverty class – coupled with a rapidly growing billionaire class. In past posts, he has demonstrated the social stratification between post-college life and labor class life – including the deliberate, premeditated elimination of unions.

On the society front, mariner has complained continuously about abuse by big data technology; he will not belabor the issue except to say that the right to live an individual life centered on the existential experience of that life is under great threat by a capitalistically driven technology.

Human life has lost its priority to a handful of dollars.

The pandemic is a dreadful way to force to the surface deep, embedded values that are fracturing this nation.

Ancient Mariner

Farming

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From a number of sources, mariner has picked up a theme that the combination of pressure to increase farm production, increased regulations about farming methods, the need to continue the use of fossil fuel versus the pressure to revamp farm equipment, has put farmers in a target zone being fired upon from every direction.

Also making smoke is an antiquated supply chain which puts the cost of farming on the shoulders of farmers while a monopolized processing chain takes an easy profit from controlled pricing to the public. The most blatant example is the chicken industry where a corporation like Perdue avoids farming costs with a minimum payment for each chicken but gathers great profit from a tightly manipulated sales strategy. Through mergers and buyouts, beef processing, more or less, has been consolidated into four large beef processing firms – which caused a stink during the pandemic because it didn’t take much to shut down four processing firms caused by Covid absences.

Add to this pressured environment dysfunctional state and federal legislatures and rising inflation and being a farmer isn’t a quiet, countryside experience. Perhaps like mariner, they may yearn for the old horse and plow days; at least back then meat supply was dealt with directly at the farm.

The reason there is growing urgency in the farming sector has to do with a number of circumstances that are worldwide. One is the fact that in a couple of decades food production around the world may feed only half the world’s population. Another is the impact of climate change on huge regions; The U.S southwest, for example, is a major supplier of hay for beef farmers but already the temperature is growing too hot and droughts are setting new records. Along the Gulf Coast flooding and very heavy storms are wreaking havoc. This is the story around the world.

Keep an eye out for news from the farm sector; it may be the most serious situation for the next generation.

Ancient Mariner

It is about the times

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Mariner’s wife has a desktop Zen calendar. Most of the time mariner struggles to grasp the point of the quote but today it couldn’t be clearer or more apropos to these times:

“The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness.”

We must find our dignity within ourselves – in the world today the reader won’t find it anywhere else. There is no news outlet broadcasting good times. Even marginal advances in humanism and technology are fraught with negatives and controversy. There is the Putin war, the totalitarian legislatures, the republican autocracy, the uncontrolled metaverse, the age of misinformation, global warming, pandemics, housing shortages, inflation, skyrocketing medical expense, China, North Korea, societal disintegration, the age of mass murders, the destructive influence of venture capital, uncontrolled private equity, growing plutocracy, Christian-based Trumpism, abusive tax structures that protect the wealthy, ignorance about the disappearing biosphere, disrespecting the very immigrants who will bolster the national population and its GDP.

Okay, mariner will stop. Oddly, it seemed almost like good news when the news outlets broadcast the passing of Madeline Albright; it wasn’t, of course, but it seemed better because it carried no angst. Bless her; she helped run a more civil nation in a different time.

Within ourselves we must find stability, sameness, a reason we exist. We must use behaviors that show responsibility for others, by doing what we can to help victims of our age.

We must separate our emotions from our thinking. Pure, educated thinking is in short supply today. We must act with vision and wisdom.

As the Zen quote implies, we must search for a world with meaning.

Ancient Mariner

 

The Winds of War

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Mariner was checking out the streaming news channels and online news sources earlier today. Getting to the point, the United States and NATO are saying Putin MUST not win. The confrontational tone definitely has risen among every moderator and guest across television news agencies. It’s as if someone burst a large boil and the belligerent juice of war has suddenly emerged.

Even the Economist magazine, published in Great Britain, has a cover and articles saying Putin must not win. Perhaps the West, having evidence of inhuman atrocities, has said, “Enough is enough.”

Ironically, mariner in the last post was reviewing a shift in intellectual attitudes about global democracy versus autocracy but suddenly today rebellion has come to the fore. The intensity of retribution across the board is to put Russia back where it really belongs, a small economy with a history of abusive government, an abusing oligarchy, and to get rid of Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps the open Russian support by Belarus sparked fears that this war already has spread beyond the Ukraine. In any case, world war may be in the offing.

Be prepared.

Ancient Mariner

Is growing autocracy a world threat?

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Suddenly many of mariner’s sources have written articles about the growing number of autocracies around the world. Autocracy and democracy do not get along well and Putin’s immoral assault on democratic Ukraine is an example of the difference in national behavior between the two political ideologies.

Matching headlines with Putin is the growing autocratic momentum in the United States. Add two or three new dictators elected in other nations in the last few months and journalists see a trend. Will the United States be able to vaccinate itself against autocracy? Will the world’s democracies be willing to engage in physical war to stem the trend? No less than The Atlantic in May’s issue has published a major article by May Applebaum about this concern:

“There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us.

They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.”[1]

Chicken Little already sits in a corner of the henhouse trembling as the November election approaches. Will the electorate use its votes to put a stop to totalitarian legislation? Amos is revisiting his will. Guru, on the other hand, feels that global warming will dominate the world’s economies to the point that there will not be time or money to fight political ideologies.

Mariner just watches 70s game shows wearing his college football helmet.

Ancient Mariner

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/autocracy-could-destroy-democracy-russia-ukraine/629363/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-weekly-newsletter&utm_content=20220403&silverid=%25%25RECIPIENT_ID%25%25&utm_term=This%20Week%20on%20TheAtlanticcom

Ranked Voting – 2

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Mariner apologizes for not making clear the manner by which a candidate wins an election in ranked voting. A straightforward demonstration follows.

To keep matters simple, an even 1,000 citizens cast their vote. That means for a candidate to win, they must garner at least 501 votes. In yesterday’s post, a ballot is shown with the ranking one voter selected.

Once all the ballots have been received, the election officials total the votes first by those with a ‘1’ ranking to see if anyone obtained at least 501 votes. It is conceivable that one candidate is so popular that they garnered enough ‘1’ votes to reach the minimum of 501 but if not, for each candidate, the officials add in all the ‘2’ votes – again to see if any candidate, with a combination of 1st and 2nd – obtained 501 or more votes. Typically, 1st and 2nd votes would total at least 501 votes. In close votes it may be necessary to add in all the ranks to achieve a majority. Below is the final score for each candidate as they were ranked in each voter’s ballot.

Typically, there are the two dominant parties who accumulate the largest number of votes so it is likely that by combining the first two ranks, some candidate likely will have won. Note, however, that the candidate who won in this example could only have done so by adding together three ranked votes – ‘1’ plus ‘2’ plus ’3’.

That’s how it works but the beauty is in the power of broader representation. The Green party candidate received 200 votes, nothing to sneeze at in local politics. Further, Jack Spratt knows he must depend on Green party values to stay elected. In this respect, mariner believes policy influence is spread out from Washington, D.C.

Ancient Mariner

 

Ranked Voting

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In 2008 mariner and his wife attended the Iowa democratic caucus (primary) to vote for Martin O’Malley. We were not allowed to cast our votes. We were the only two present who wanted to vote for this candidate. We had to switch to two more popular candidates to assure a majority for the winning candidate. Of course we did not.

As the reader may know, mariner is skeptical that the concept of ‘one person, one vote’ exists. As 63 percent of the American public attests today, there is little confidence in the two-party system.

The most common complaints:

  • Both parties are owned by big money, billionaires, the oil industry, etc.
  • Both parties have destroyed valid party representation through severe gerrymandering.
  • Both parties control party affiliation through big budget domination; third parties and local favorites don’t have a chance.
  • Voters feel they must vote against what they fear rather than what they would prefer – even if a preferred third party is on the ballot.
  • While more Americans voted in 2020 than in any other presidential election in 120 years, 33 percent, 1 in 3 voters, did not.

Every once in a while mariner rummages through obscure magazines and online sources looking for alternatives to the two party system. Lately, a new phenomenon has popped up: 50 jurisdictions in the United States have switched to ranked voting. Ranked voting means the voter can rank several candidates according to preference. A voter can cast a vote for a preferred party first then rank a second vote for another party and can rank every candidate on the ballot. This distributes the final count to the candidate with the most votes by rank rather than a simple majority. Even if a candidate comes in second or third, they may have enough votes to be influential in government politics..

This simple modification greatly reduces the advantages of gerrymandering. Further, third parties have a chance to gather votes as a first choice because the voter feels that the voter’s second, more dominant party still gets a vote.

Today’s citizenry is aware that elected candidates are part of a national plutocracy. Or, they could vote for the far right crazies if they are of that ilk. Otherwise, not even an independent billionaire (Tom Steyer) can campaign successfully against the Koch Brothers and Elon Musk.

Reflecting back on Congressman Ro Khanna’s book about dignity in government, ranked voting isn’t exactly his perspective but mariner believes that allowing multiple parties to inject special voter interests is a way to increase participation beyond Washington D.C.

None of the fifty districts includes multiple subordinate districts but if enough state legislators promote ranked voting, it may become popular enough to generate some legitimacy to what frequently is called ‘one person, one vote’.

Ancient Mariner

Church versus State –

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– in Afghanistan. The Muslim practices relating to women are severely punishing; not only physically but emotionally and with life-long debilitation. In Afghanistan the church side dominates the state side without question. Note the following excerpts from the Associated Press:

“Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers unexpectedly decided against reopening schools Wednesday to girls above the sixth grade, reneging on a promise and opting to appease their hard-line base at the expense of further alienating the international community. The international community has urged Taliban leaders to reopen schools and give women their right to public space.”

Islam dominates every aspect of daily life. Very frequently government legislators and judges are imams (priests) as well. When the United States wrote the original Constitution, it declared that religion was free to practice as it desired and the state had the same mandate. Fortunately, the Reformation had begun beforehand or the U.S. may have found itself in a situation similar to Afghanistan. The reader may recall the bitter confrontations between early ‘denominations’. The Christian religion absolutely is totalitarian and can muscle in on the State’s authority with little difficulty. This occurs consistently in the United States because ‘freedom of religion’ was free to run without a leash.

The clash between the freedom guaranteed to the people via the vote and the mandates of religious practice are in constant battle, to wit: abortion, gay rights, segregation, state practices like marriage, zoning, tax shelters and advocating conservative causes like Trumpism and immigration – the last two clearly matters of state.

Given the totalitarian conflict between church and state, money grubbing between capitalism and socialism, national demolition between Trump and the electorate, existence of privacy between big data and the individual citizen and the imminent flooding of Tiger Woods’ 41 million dollar home in Florida, We the People are in good shape. Indeed good shape – would you rather live in Afghanistan? Or, sigh, Denmark?

Ancient Mariner

 

Jobs

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A company called RoboBurger is out with a machine that will make you a burger with custom toppings in six minutes for $6.99, Jennifer A. Kingson reports in What’s Next.

In the food courts of the future, you could avoid human interaction by ordering from a hamburger vending machine, a pizza vending machine and, of course, cupcake vending machines.

The first RoboBurger machine was just installed in the Newport Centre Mall in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Besides mariner’s lamentations about the future regarding the loss of human contact and abuse to the social herding instinct referenced in the last post, he wonders what will happen to all the low income fast food workers as these boxes spread. The employees don’t have any assets to speak of – where is the next underpaid job market?

Artificial intelligence expert and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee predicted that 40 percent of the world’s jobs will be replaced by robots in the next 15 to 25 years. That means two out of every five working class people will be out of work at a time when there are no other jobs to be had.

The type of job that is in imminent danger is warehousing people filling orders for online sites like Amazon.  Also at great risk are taxi drivers, uber drivers, and other ride-share drivers. Autonomous self-driving cars will use AI technology to drive and apps to identify who needs to be picked up and dropped off. Payment will be made with a credit-card swipe.

UK’s Institute of the Motor Industry states, ‘As many as 97 percent of active auto mechanics aren’t qualified to work on electric cars and won’t get their hands dirty in the future – robots can handle it.’

Assembly line workers will disappear and, interestingly, so will air traffic controllers.

Close to mariner’s home, librarians will disappear as the tracking system becomes fully automated and virtually all reading will be online or in digitized form.

Remember Nadine? She will be the replacement for payroll clerks, human resource staff, customer service representatives, cashiers (don’t get mariner’s wife started), translators and even mortgage brokers.. . . And this is a small list. Mariner is dumbfounded by what the world will be like in 2050. Guru won’t even talk about it. Our best guess for insight may be a fortune teller, certainly not our government’s octogenarian legislators.

Ancient Mariner